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Background and contribution:
Doug Collins was a British soldier in World War II. He was captured and escaped several times. He worked in an intelligence capacity with the British Control Commission in occupied Germany after the war. He emigrated to Canada in the 1950s and worked for several Canadian newspapers. He drew the ire of the Holocaust Enforcers after he testified for Ernst ZÃ¼ndel in the 1985 Great Holocaust Trial. He declared that as a journalist, he saw nothing wrong with the booklet “Did Six Million Really Die?” and that he found no “hate” in that 30,000 word essay. An award-winning journalist and TV commentator and the author of several books, Collins was hauled before a quasi-court by Holocaust Enforcers when he wrote a column about “Swindler’s List” and commented on the preponderance of Jews in Hollywood. He and his paper had to defend themselves before the British Columbia Human Rights Commission, which, in the end, ruled in his favor, after his paper spent more than $200,000 and Collins spent $50,000 of his own money. Barely had he won the case when he was re-charged – for the same column, along with three others!

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The guy, who looked like the mashed version of the British bulldog,
was pursued by the Politically Correct government of British Columbia
for his supposedly Nazi-like thoughts about Jews.

FREEDOM FIGHTER DIES

He felt Schindler’s List should be called Swindler’s List.

Truth seekers and freedom fighters of the world lost someone from their ranks just recently. Doug Collins may not have been well-known other than in some parts of Canada, but to thousands of people he was a giant of a man. The best comment I heard said about him, after his death on Sunday, September 30th, 2001 was:

“He was a man of real courage in a nation of wimps.”

Since he died last month I’ve been looking to read a decent obituary but the mainstream press (to whom he was well known) glossed over his death and if they said anything at all it was derisive.

But finally today I read a moving and emotional obituary in Canada’s version of TIME magazine and attach it here for others to read.

The world becomes a lonelier place when great and courageous people leave us. In my opinion Mr Doug Collins was such a person. ~ Jackie Jura

DEATH OF A TRUE RADICAL
by Alan Fotheringham, MacLean’s, Oct 15, 2001:

What’s the old rule — never speak ill of the dead? Surprising it is how people think that an outmoded treatise, something they are proud to defy, and the quicker the better. Doug Collins, the toughest man I ever met, died last week in Vancouver at 81. Before his body could even be moved to the grave, the Vancouver Sun — his old paper he once adorned with fiery passion — had a smug, sanctimonious editorial dumping on the corpse that was still warm: “Even when Mr. Collins was right, he was wrong, because all he did with his bellicose approach was stoke the unconstructive anger of his supporters.” That is a most admirable logical leap, even for an editorial writer. Black is white. Right is actually wrong. Orwell would love it. It was a constant theme — even Conrad Black admitted it didn’t make sense in regard to Collins — among the Politically Correct who decorated the final days of a complex guy whose whole life was about fighting for the freedom to say something that other people thought was wrong.

That Collins was a complex character would be an underestimate. I once, having hired him while he was in a bad patch, did not speak to him for 10 years. Until I figured the bullies, the new Politically Correct who now ruled the roost, were the most intolerant of all, those who could not abide a true radical who listened only to his own inner drum and didn’t give a damn for those who disagreed. He had been through a mill that his opponents could never imagine. The guy, who looked like the mashed version of the British bulldog, is remembered in all the obits for being pursued by the Politically Correctness NDP (late) government of British Columbia for his supposedly Nazi-like thoughts about Jews. At his death, he was still hoping to overturn a $2,000 penalty handed him by the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal.

The background? First, in May of 1940, the “miracle of Dunkirk,” somehow, with the help of English tiny boats, getting more than 300,000 troops off that beach in France and saving the base of the British army that would invade Normandy four years later. Among those left behind on the beach was the teenage Doug Collins of the Second Gloucesters. As a prisoner of war, he was shipped off to a concentration camp in Poland, where he was instructed he would remain until the end of the war. Four months later, he escaped, headed for Russia. Caught, he was stripped naked to stand for 24 hours facing a wall, beaten by enraged guards. It was his 20th birthday. He was sent to work in a Silesian coal mine. He escaped, was sent to two different stalags, escaped and passed by a camp later known as Auschwitz. In all, he escaped from 10 Nazi PoW camps, well recorded in his memoir published in 1968. At the end of the war, he was in prison in Romania, as American B-24s rained bombs on him, actually aiming at the Ploesti oilfields.

After the war, being awarded a military medal, he spent time with the De-Nazification branch of the British Control Commission. This is a guy who sides with Nazis against Jews? Arriving at the Vancouver Sun, he was a ferocious left-wing British Labourite, standing up to editors with a panache that indicated they had never seen anyone with his guts. In a fight over principle, as usual, he left to become a ferocious host-interviewer with the CBC in Ottawa. The usual dispute arose there, he asked my help in rescuing “a broken-down hack” and I convinced the publisher of the Sun to rehire him. Alas, the experience with CBC bureaucracy had turned the passionate lefty into an even more passionate perceived “right-winger” who defended anyone who wanted to say anything. Having been there, he thought the Holocaust figure of “six million dead” an exaggeration. Thus, he felt Schindler’s List should be called Swindler’s List — the same defiant tone of one who once stood on a German prison train screaming insults at passing Nazi troops, a crazy guy perhaps, but always defiant. The Western Jewish Bulletin backed his right to say what he thought — even though they felt it “rubbish.” The North Shore News, a thrice-weekly Vancouver suburban paper, ran Collins’s increasingly controversial column for 14 years after he left the Sun — and before firing him. Canadian Association for Free Expression director Paul Fromm asked Conrad Black, who once owned the paper, why his company was not supporting Collins’s court appeal. Replied Black: “We considered the [human rights tribunal] ruling a suppression of speech. However, Collins is a rather disreputable person. It’s a moral puzzle.” It is indeed. Right is wrong. Black is white. That’s why he was sacked. ~ Alan Fotheringham